Adverse weather conditions have a major impact on the safety and operation of roads, from signalized arterials to Interstate highways. Weather affects driver behavior, vehicle performance, pavement friction, and roadway infrastructure. Weather events and their impacts on roads can be viewed as predictable, non-recurring incidents that affect safety, mobility and productivity. Weather affects roadway safety through increased crash risk, as well as exposure to weather-related hazards. Weather impacts roadway mobility by increasing travel time delay, reducing traffic volumes and speeds, increasing speed variance, and decreasing roadway capacity. Weather events influence productivity by disrupting access to road networks, and increasing road operating and maintenance costs.
Previous systems that provide current travel and road information to travelers include state 511 sites. Road-specific data that are presented on the 511 site are typically submitted by maintenance worker's reports of conditions experienced. The 511 site data are generally only applicable for wide stretches of roadway, and are frequently multiple hours old.
Other prior road hazard warning systems require mobile data to function and fail to take full advantage of ancillary information available such as dual-polarization radar, which can detect precipitation type, the Naval Research Laboratory cloud classification satellite data, weather station observations, ground cover information, and precipitation history. Without the use of this additional ancillary input data, it is not possible to produce high quality, physically-relevant inferences of weather conditions along the roadway.
What is needed is an increasingly accurate, reliable and precise system for assessing and communicating weather and road hazard information to travelers that integrates more of the available data sources.